


Picking up the Pieces

by The_Exile



Category: Mother 2: Gyiyg no Gyakushuu | EarthBound, Mother 3, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Apocalypse, Doom, Gen, Headcanon, Pre-Mother 3, Pre-Undertale, Spoilers, Time Travel, post-mother 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-08
Updated: 2016-12-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 06:05:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8786482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: Several ideas for a Mother and Undertale fusion AU. Deals with the causes of the disaster that happened to the world between Mother 2 and 3, with Frisk and Chara's origin before falling into Mt. Ebott, an alternate origin for Napstablook and the story behind Buzz-Buzz's time travel.





	1. Chapter 1

_I still believe in miracles, I swear I’ve seen a few/ And the time will surely come when you can see my point of view/I believe in second chances and that’s why I believe in you._

**Restricted Section, Chimera Lab**

The footsteps are growing louder, coming closer. He can hear loud yells and weapons being fired. The Chimerae he 'accidentally' let out of their cages as a distraction roar in frustration and pain as they attack the first thing they see out of hunger but are inevitably put down by the heavily armed Pigmask squad. He no longer hears the occasional bellow of the Ultimate Chimera, half-bestial, half avian and slightly mechanical, that sends shockwaves along the floor even from the next floor down. Someone must have managed to get behind it for long enough to hit its deactivation switch. 

He had been hoping for longer.

Rushing the process is a bad idea but failing altogether would be worse, so he starts inputting commands even faster. The room's automated defences kick in as someone tries to force the door open. A turret swivels around and shoots the first two Pigmasks dead, then a hail of laser fire destroys the turret in an explosion that rocks the room again, sending one of his tools skittering across the floor. He swears under his breath and hopes he won't need it. 

"Head Researcher Andonuts! You are not authorised to use the Phase Distorter! Misuse of the device is punishable by immediate execution!" barks the Pigmask in the officer's uniform with the white cape. His voice is modulated by a device in his helmet to make it sound deliberately distorted. It's supposed to be intimidating but it just sounds faulty. The laser rifle pointed at the scientist is menacing enough. 

"You can have this back when I've done with it," responds Dr. Andonuts.

"The building is surrounded and you can't possibly escape. Your attempts at sabotaging our operations have failed. The Masked Man is coming," said the officer, "You don't want to have to get him involved. He's in a bad mood."

"And I'm sure Porky can track me down even in this thing," the scientist sighed. He moves as though he is going to put his hands up in the air, then knocks a device with his elbow. His last line of defence, one of the reconstruction devices he had taken the safeguards off. The officer yells and dives to the floor to avoid a large green laser that cuts through the floor on its way to him. Someone panics and takes a shot that ricochets off the Phase Distorter that is now humming a lot faster than it was. It hits the scientist on the arm and he screams in pain but its too late. With his other hand, he manages to slam down the last lever, then dive inside just in time to avoid another shot. 

He doesn't avoid being caught a glancing blow by the reconstruction laser. The green light sears into his leg, even more agonising than being shot. It feels as though it is spreading. It occurs to him that he has no idea what the setting for the chamber had been before he booby-trapped it and then moved it. 

It won't matter, he tells himself, not compared to what a Phase Distorter does to a biological life form using it without the proper protection.

As he winks out of existence in that point of space and time, he hears a familiar blood-curdling roar as the Ultimate Chimera turns back on.

* * *

**Soundtesting Department, Game Over Screen**

The wraith drifts over the Global Soundsystem's booth, nudges the door open with a spectral psuedopod, then moulds himself into the operator's compartment. Designed for a variety of shapes as it is, the mechanism easily accommodates him, moving where necessary, and recognises his ethereal presence as existing. There are only faint sighs emanating from spiritual entity, mid-cycle ventilation system and slight pressure of the door opening.

Amorphous ectoplasm adheres to the shape of soft plastic padding as he places a bulky black pair of headphones either side of the round, black spirals that count as eyes, galaxies of dark matter that smear as if tearstained. He nods in time to a beat audible to his own inner senses, a mind that never stopped counting, his perfect auditory recall sending a constant stream to bridge the gap between the last soundtesting session and the next. He abhors silence. He knows what it would mean, should such a phenomenon ever occur naturally. He doesn't like to break the silence with words either; the things that he should be detecting needed no words to speak with him, only sound and rhythm. Should something start spontaneously talking to him, that was probably bad news as well. 

Closing his eyes, he lets himself relax fully against the head-rest. The headphone cables fall back into some unseen compartment that opens and closes with a hiss. He feels a myriad other thick black cables fall away, sealing his connection even as the main panel sealed shut with a faint whine, separating him from the already fairly isolated sector of the office complex so that he can concentrate fully on a particularly crucial job. 

Warm, heavy, thick darkness envelops him, accompanied by Game Over's logo, a straight line inside a small border of a box made of a single unbroken line, on an endless field of black. The border and line are the same slowly flashing dark pink light as ever, the one that should make him think that either the lightbulb, the machine or his own life force were low on power, possibly all three, and yet was oddly reassuring, even to other employees who aren't used to being utterly confused about whether they counted as alive or dead. Right now, as the logo floated across the screen and bounced against the borders in a style that should have gone out of fashion decades ago but that he’s glad they refused to modernise, he doesn't care either way. Not that he’s depressed - he often is, but never while he’s jacked in - but because it literally makes no difference here. Matter is spirit, spirit is information, information is sound, one continuous wave of pure existence. The machine plays a few Game Over tunes from a selection specially chosen to relax employees and improve their concentration. They’re simple riffs that indicate starting over from the beginning, of being at the centre of all things, as well as the surrender to something higher that always quiets the restless spirit. He feels himself soar on that familiar first note as he enters the true soundtest.

Today is just a routine sweep, a flyby of all the core control units for the global soundsystems. The output of all the regional units, themselves containing all the data from the units covering the individual worldsystems, would feed back to these core satellites before being sent back to Game Over for debugging. Individual mistakes were quickly corrected without the need of a sentient operator, unless something needed investigating because it was badly out of tune, refused the automatic correction process, was one of a suspicious run of similar errors or matched the signature pattern of a virus or deliberate alteration. In these cases, an on-site specialist such as himself is necessary. He could technically have just pulled the individual recordings from the database straight away but he likes to open up the entire map so that he can visualise their pattern. The links between the nodes reminds him of a burning spider's web, its constantly moving traffic of information lighting up the darkness between the sectors, so far apart in an inhospitable darkness that physical travel had been discarded as impractical millennia ago. Different colours indicate different functions, Game Over tunes being, of course, dark pink. He changes the notation to show only the variables of perfect working order or one of several possible malfunctions. 

Already certain what he was looking for to some extent, he almost immediately enlarges a particular region. There had already been a few odd patterns, a large cluster of small distortions in one particular area that had experienced major malfunctions before. In fact, had there not been a routine sweep scheduled so soon after he spotted the anomalies, he had been tempted to try and find an excuse to give the place a thorough investigation outside the usual checks. The bureaucracy would have been a nightmare, as he would have been accused of a personal interest in the region containing his home world almost immediately, but it would have been worth it. It wasn't that he wanted to make sure his old home was given special attention - although he had to admit he was a little more worried than he would have been if any other region were threatened, not that it was a sensible idea to be even a little relaxed about such a potential threat. He simply didn't trust any other specialist in the Soundtesting department with a matter this important. They didn't have the experience of this particular incident and they didn't have the natural affinity, as if they were at one with the soundwaves. Not that they weren't talented or good at their jobs - he had seen the same look in everyone's eyes, although it was a little easier to spot when said facial features weren't two large black swirls - but there was something missing. He presumed it was the same outsider's perspective that made everyone suspicious of him, the anomalies that placed him halfway between life and death. The other team members had been told that he had ended up like this after finding out the hard way (although worse things could have happened, he reminds himself, shuddering as he remembers Gaster’s face) that standard resurrection procedures didn’t work on him, that he was just in a weird sector of the Universe where something had been damaged. They still whispered behind his back, wanting to know how it had been damaged in the first place, had he been using bootleg 1-Ups, was he likely to go crazy and what would happen if it spreads. In the end, it didn't matter; what mattered was that the anomalies had cropped up again and were not going away. In fact, they were spreading.

Spreading like wildfire. Like a plant's spores. Or like an unchecked virus.

Slight distortions that weren't from environmental wear and tear or desynchronisation between the stored recordings and the current state of the cosmic music that was being amplified. Viral spreading patterns, but with no other viral activity. A suspicious regularity or reaction to change that implied conscious change, an agent behind the malfunctions. Another might suspect a hacker who was nearing dangerous levels of access where they could destabilise the conditions of the habitable Universe itself. An experienced staff member might test against known sentient computer viruses. Only a small minority would remember to check for other actual malicious events that the music was adapting to, something that had evolved there naturally, or at least been created when it wasn't supposed to have, but now existed there natively nonetheless. 

But that problem should have been solved already...

It was during moments like this that he wished he was at the sort of job where he could sit at a desk and chew a pen, or screw a piece of paper into a ball and throw it in a wastebasket, or something, anything, to relieve frustration. Even if he wasn't directly connected to his computer's nervous system, likely to break something vital himself if his thought patterns became too chaotic, he didn't have teeth, or digits precise enough to screw up the paper. Instead, he deliberately speeds up the whole framework, letting his consciousness fly faster until it shot off like a rocket, twirling the abstraction around and around. To his spectral body, it’s the closest thing to a quick jog around the building, and has the added bonus that everything spins from side to side slightly like some sort of desk toy until it all found its place. 

That’s when he noticed that one thing isn't going back to how it was. A few instances here and there, things are running backwards, not due to confusion in the model, but because they had been so in the recording. Unauthorised time manipulation. He expands this sector a little more until he has the precise details. This causes him to notice another anomaly: a second source of unusual self-awareness at the site of a music error, something unrelated to the error he’s now sure has to be re-occurring. Another pattern he recognises, though. And it’s cropping up everywhere in the sector, including, once or twice, in his home world. 

He can't help but notice that something has also been distorting Game Over tunes there again.

Saving his changes, uploading a few more separate timeslices of the exact errors he had spotted, he runs the perfunctory repair tools - they would keep everything going for now, even though he knew it would take more to stop it all eventually collapsing - then he begins the log-out process. It takes him a good half hour to safely unwind and disconnect himself, a lot longer than it did to log in. Unsafe disconnection damage isn’t another problem he wants added to his plate. As soon as he’s out, he leaps from the machine, as much as ghosts can leap, then hovers as fast as he can towards the Director's office, information safely stored on his headphones. 

He may have forgotten once or twice that he wasn't allowed to go through walls. The automated security forces may have shot at him a few times as a result.


	2. Chapter 2

**The Void**

Counting time is impossible inside a Phase Distorter but it feels as though half an hour passes inside the complete darkness, with only a sensation of tumbling and being buffeted by a strong wind, as though in a tiny vessel on a storm-tossed sea. His body still feels wrong - he can feel the changes crawling through his system - so it is a mercy that he only barely has a sense of existing inside it. He feels more as though he's observing himself from the outside, a disconnected soul floating in the impossible ether as it penetrated a forbidden void. 

With literally nothing else to do - except reminisce, which he knows he mustn't do if he wants to stay sane - the scientist thinks about what exactly he's going to do once he gets where he's going. He knows he will have to warn someone but has no idea who he can trust or what exactly to say.

He is aware that he probably has very limited time.

The machine lurches violently and begins spinning in a different direction as something slammed into it. A familiar deranged laugh rings out, punctuated by hoarse coughing, wheezing and the whining of a missile salvo, the bright flash of lasers and what looks like flailing thorny vines (that weapon is a new one on him). He hadn't expected to escape in a Phase Distorter from someone else who owns a Phase Distorter. Hells, it's probably the SAME Phase Distorter! The shields hold but the attacked vessel is knocked off course. Going to the wrong place would be as dangerous for the mission as taking damage, so he focuses on finding his bearings and steering himself back in the right direction.

Another volley hits him but he predicts the direction of the attack this time. The impact only propels his craft further into the past. An alarm other than the battle alert and the damage notifications sounds on his HUD: an oncoming storm. Some part of the timeline is particularly chaotic and he's headed straight for it. 

There are only two things he could think of that would cause so much crackling, angry crimson chaos, and he doesn't want to see either of them. Porky has retreated, which is both a good and bad sign. 

The scientist cannot afford to retreat even if he had the power to send a damaged craft anywhere except in a straight line.

* * *

**Psychic Research Facility, Peaceful Rest Valley**

"We can't give up now, Chara!"

"I'll take them down with me," the other child hissed, their voice cold and biting as the night air, or the bloodstained knife that their hand was still tightly wrapped around.

"Did... did our friend tell you to do that, too?"

"I'll have to kill them all in the end, anyway."

"But you'll get me killed as well, and you won't be able to do anything if we're both dead. I came all the way here for you. To save you. I didn't have to, you know. They would have kept me safe."

"Nobody is safe."

"They even offered me freedom if I helped them track you down."

"They're lying."

"I know."

"I'm still not sure I should trust you.”

"You don't have anyone else, and you won't make it on your own," reminded the first child, "Where do you think you're going, anyway? Are you going to find our friend?"

The second child nodded, "I'll find them, and... I'll stab them too."

"But they're way more your friend than they are mine..."

A loud explosion lit up the sky. The low drone of servo-motors and the thud of laser bolts were drawing closer. The child grabbed their friend and propped them up, despite their protests. The second child could have turned their psychic attacks on their friend - the child could sense that some energy still flowed through their psyche, even after the exhausting flight from the facility - but they didn't. 

"Stand up. Help me shove us down that hill, enough to get a good run-up, then we attempt a teleport. Got it?" 

"A teleport, huh?" a smile cracked their dirt-stained, wild-eyed face, "Know what'll happen if you mess up? In a stressful situation like this? With all these mountains around?"

"Nothing worse than getting murdered by drones."

"You have a point," he shrugged, "Hey, Frisk..."

"My name is Itoi!" the other child snapped.

"Our friend renamed you Frisk, so you're Frisk," Chara grinned, "Hey, Frisk... you're responsible for everything that happens in the future, by my hand, because you saved me."

"Just shut up and start running," said Frack. 

I know you just didn't like your old name, Frisk thought, as they reached both into the last dregs of their own mental pool and out to the thin stream flowing into them through Cass' slender hand, now growing warm from the energy manifesting at the fingertips. The shared pool pulsed between them, a crackling, surging orb. They released it outwards at the same time, letting it imbue them with a final burst of speed. A wind had picked up, together with a light spattering of rain, and they felt it tug at their hair and clothes as they ran down the hill. Frisk thrust his other arm back and imagined that they were just two normal children playing a game, that it was a warm midday and not the dead of night, that other children were chasing them, not a Government security team out for their blood. Frisk always liked to imagine that they were siblings, even though Frisk was very Dalaamese and Chara was very obviously from Winters. Maybe their dad was from Winters and their mum was from Dalaam. That sort of thing was becoming more common now that every nation was expected to co-operate for the higher goal of preventing intergalactic threats and building supernatural countermeasures. 

Chara started laughing, then sprung into the air, seconds before they reached the bottom of the hill. Frisk followed suit to avoid falling flat on their face. They realised that they had no idea whether this was the normal next stage to this game. From what they saw on the computer, or heard from older children who had manifested later in life, they had imagined it involved more rolling down the hills, and also a dog was supposed to be overtaking them right now and maybe licking their faces.

"Okay, then... TELEPORT!" 

_You could have at least given me a count of three, you..._

The lurching sensation yanked Frisk by the arm. They almost did pitch face first into the ground this time, as well as throwing up and dislocating the arm still held tightly by a child who was disapparating and trying to drag Frisk bodily along with them. The only thing to do was to hastily activate their side of the mutual teleport, hoping that the slight timing delay wasn’t going to ruin things, that the amount of power used was equal on both sides. Joint power use wasn’t something they had been taught properly yet, and now they could never go back to their teachers ever again. 

Frisk saw their arm dematerialise along with the one attached to it, then they blacked out.


	3. Chapter 3

**The Void**

Try as he might, Dr. Andonuts remembers the white ships and the blinding light that flared up behind them ever brighter until it winked out into nothing again like a television turning off. In the depths of space, there is no sound of an explosion. The destruction of an entire world is utterly silent. Nobody knows what to say or can bring themselves to talk as they watch what they already know is inevitable, although they have a service later during which they sing 'A Bad Dream'. It is a song both of sorrow and determination to go on regardless, that one day they would wake up to see the sunrise after the darkness again. 

Dr. Andonuts had turned up only for the benefit of others, not for himself. Despite the fact that he had worked on the evacuation ships as well, or even that the attack satellites had begun as a legitimate effort to defend the planet against the threat of extraterrestrial attacks that had been proven a reality, he still felt responsible for the disaster. He had always naively gone ahead with any plans to build weapons. After all, he had lived in a time when they were necessary to fight genuine threats, and he had always been able to trust the people he gave them to, such as his son. He had never considered what they would be used for once there was no Giygas. He had almost thanked Pokey for the chance to go back and fix his mistakes, if it wasn't for the atrocities that the boy had forced him to commit in that research laboratory as he bided his time and waited until he was trusted.

The crackling interference to his radar and the red static is building up. He hopes it isn't what he thinks it is. The battle with Giygas shouldn't still be going on - by necessity, the Cosmic Destroyer would have to be erased from all time periods in order for it not to immediately crop up in another place and time. However, he admits that he still doesn't know how the sudden massive wave of psychic energy that eventually disintegrated Giygas, seemingly out of nowhere, actually worked. He also doesn't know what effect Pokey's actions in meddling with the other enormous psychic force in the Universe - the Dragon - would actually have on the rest of space and time. For all he knows, the two energy sources are the same thing.

If Giygas still exists, he needs to change his plans. It's essential to warn someone about Pokey but not quite important enough to disrupt the effort to fight Giygas. It's also essential that he doesn't get spotted by Giygas. He turns off the vessel's sensors. Still damaged, he drifts completely blind for a long time.

He knows there's still a risk that Giygas has found him anyway.

* * *

**Final Floor, Dungeon Man**

Anyone observing the figure who was seemingly half-asleep in the restroom as usual, might think that they had been taken off guard by the attack. They wouldn't have associated the rejuvenating bench that was usually downstairs, now roped off with a large crack through the centre of it and an 'Out Of Order' signpost in front of it, with the fact that the telephone didn't work either, or the Lifenoodle stand that had been in business outside the Pyramid since only the day before. Aware of the coming confrontation though they were, that it would not be resolved peacefully under any circumstances, the figure still could not bring themself to end the lives of anyone they had not sold Lifenoodles to. In an ideal world, they would have given away the lifenoodles as an apology for taking down the local telephone line – there were still people who just came in to order a pizza or ring their mum - but the figure knew they would need money again soon. They had hidden the money away in the rest room with them, behind the one door that didn't open no matter what any adventurer did. The sanctity of the only toilet facility in practically an entire continent was apparently an excuse enough for such a durable door, despite there being a giant litterbox outside. 

The figure had been pondering the meaning of life when the adventurers came, something they always did, but today their thoughts had turned to darker matters, knowing what was about to come. They had already seen how large that party was compared to usual, easily five or six times the size, efficiently organised into smaller parties with a range of healers, offensive spellcasters, mobile units and armoured units to protect the leaders at the core. The figure had monitored them for long enough to know that they weren't the sort of adventurers who were here to laugh at Brick Road's silly signposts or take photographs of the ducks.

They still had vague memories of life in that kind of adventuring band. They had hoped one of them wouldn’t come here. Such forces weren’t common in Scaraba – there wasn’t much for them to do out here, and slow movement range was the bane of their existence – but they had been drawn closer and closer, by the rumours of interplanetary threats, of ancient pyramids full of gems, of an up-and-coming dungeon designer, of a freshly stocked, wondrous new type of dungeon that had been rendered immobile and defenceless by a tragic architectural flaw. They had no doubt that Brick Road knew what an adventurer was, had at least read warnings in lots of different manuals about what the sods could be like, hopefully at least one worst case scenario such as this one. They also knew that the venerable dungeon designer was getting on in years, had become complacent out here with no visitors except close friends and migratory birds, had forgotten a lot of what he used to know through being unable to apply it. He was also going a little dotty from his own immobility and isolation, although his assistant didn’t like to say anything, especially considering the comparative mental state of someone who chose to stay here of their own free will, mostly in an even smaller space, and who talked to even fewer sentient beings in a typical day. 

It was probably the case that nothing could be done by now, even by the most savvy of dungeon defenders. The unseen dungeon labourer had disabled all the amenities, made the traps a little less safe, altered the signs to make them deliberately unhelpful, told all the stronger monsters to encounter the party earlier in a vain hope of a successful alpha strike. All had been in vain. Boxed into a small corridor with Mad Ducks playing havoc with their psychic powers while Lesser Mooks filled the room with alternating fire and ice, trapdoors opening up under their feet into spike pits, the adventurers still managed to slaughter their way through every single guardian of the now-burning labyrinth. 

They were on the top floor. Soon, they would be face to face with Dungeon Man’s owner. The old man still hadn’t gotten around to hiring a proper final guardian to replace that duck who went missing. He was completely defenceless.

“Final guardian? Oh, no, I’m afraid we still haven’t installed one,” the figure heard him say in that vague, distracted tone of his, “We’ve had several complaints already, and rest assured, we’re working on the problem. If you would like to leave a review, I keep feedback forms next to the box near my left nostril, although the pen appears to be...”

Their leader, a tall, slim Scarabian woman in leather armour dyed red, her raven hair shaved at the sides and the remainder set into a single braid, sauntered over to the face, meeting it at eye level. She pointed a sword between Brick Road’s eyes. 

“You know, my last sword was called Complaint,” she told him quite casually, leaning her other arm on her hip, “I liked to make puns based on ‘leaving complaints’ in people’s ribcages or spines or so on. I lost that sword to a rust beast, and it was my favourite. These days, I’ve learned only to name things that are permanent, such as magical artifacts, or relationships with trusted allies.”

“Puns are fun,” agreed the dungeon designer, “I put puns on my notice boards, but I think they were repainted recently, and my assistant has issues remembering what I want on which notice board, so...”

“I particularly liked the one with ‘Legendary Sword of Victory’ written on it that led to the falling piano shaft. I would have done the same, too, in your situation.”

“Oh, so that’s what the racket was. I must remember to have a word with my...”

“You know, you’re one sick puppy,” said the party leader, “But everything is falling apart around you. The lower floors are on fire, and soon it’ll reach here. Can you even move from that spot, or should I extract you with this handy all-purpose tool of mine?”

“I haven’t been able to move my real body for ten years now. I don’t suppose you freed the legs on your way up?”

The sword swung around, its gleaming blade bursting into flames as it did so, but Arial caught sight of it first. A signpost smacked into the wielder’s hand, knocking the aim wild and yielding an expletive. The second board almost hit her in the head. She crouched down and sprang backwards, looking around for the interloper. 

A hidden compartment swung open and a tall, pale figure jumped out. Landing cat-like between swordswoman and dungeon designer’s face, they turned to Brick Road and began undoing more panels and catches, whispering passwords and running a hand over fingerprint readers in order to elicit digital bleeps of approval. One by one, locks slid open.

“Come on, we’re leaving,” they told the old man firmly, looking over one shoulder at the adventurers. A little unsure of themselves in the light of such an odd development, they hesitated to act, although they were still shuffling closer, hands on weapons, a few of them silently chanting the opening verses of spells. The figure wasn’t armed, didn’t look likely to attack, but the experienced dungeoneers knew that the most dangerous types of foes usually didn’t need weapons or a head start.

“Go away,” the leader was warned, “Nothing left for you here.”

“It’s the final room,” said the leader dubiously.

“It’s a maintenance room, and you weren’t supposed to get in.”

“It wasn’t locked or hidden.”

“The front door was, and we don’t hand out keys. I don’t know where the hell you got one. This dungeon is under construction, and you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Final guardians usually say stuff to trick people, like ‘join me and we can rule the Universe together’ or ‘I’m not evil, the person who gave you the quest is’. Are you the final guardian?”

“You’re going to wish we had a damn final guardian instead of me, if you don’t go away soon.”

“Ah, now that sounds like a proper threat,” she said, pointing her sword at the figure, “Everyone, attack as one!”

Her grasp of Eaglelandish wasn’t good enough to understand a broad Fourside accent, so the leader didn’t understand what he yelled. She only recognised that there was now a psychic shield of incredible strength in front of both dungeon designer and possibly-final-guardian, and that the source probably wasn’t the old man, judging by the yellow light that now completely eclipsed the figure’s eyes as they threw their head back and screamed. Brick Road shook his head and mouthed something frantically as he struggled to finish disentangling himself from the machinery that was in the process of deactivating. This was futile, even had he not been almost completely sapped of strength by the effort of remembering how a human body worked after ten years of directly neurally operating his own dungeon, as his words were drowned out by the roaring as the dungeon began tearing itself apart.

As the sky itself fell down...


	4. Chapter 4

**Doctor Andonuts' Laboratory, Winters**

Seconds after the satellite had relayed the warning to the military base in Winters, a frantic scientist came online to override the order to point several of the orbital lasers directly at Scaraba.

“The signal was not interstellar,” insisted the scientist, a panicked tone in his voice, “The asteroid field was redirected locally, by a human located on this planet.”

“Psychic capability is extremely anomalous for a human,” responded the AI.

“But not unprecedented. The psychokinetic technique known as ‘Starstorm’ has been performed twice… once by a human,” the scientist corrected himself, then frowned and scratched his head, as though he was as confused as the person standing next to him at the mistake he had made.

“Only known human is the current Crown Prince Poo of Dalaam. Not hostile. Technique was clearly used with hostility in mind.”

“We don’t know it wasn’t self-defence.”

“The only known threat requiring such a level of force as retaliation would be extraterrestrial in nature,” argued the computer, “Another likely scenario is mind control by a malicious alien force...”

“Which wouldn’t necessarily be in the same place as the individuals it was controlling,” the scientist reminded the AI, “Here’s another likely scenario: a lot of the test subjects have become unstable lately and there have been a lot of lab escapees…”

“Talking of the escapees, another lab was hit recently. It went badly. Most of the staff dead, the place burned to the ground,” said the other man in the room, “Eagleland’s President is demanding an explanation.”

The scientist cried out and threw a cup of coffee across the room. Fortunately for the onlooker who was splashed, the contents were stone cold by now, the scientist being too distracted even to partake of his only joy in life apart from science. He’s also forgetting to contact his son every now and then, the man realised, he must have promised to keep in touch a thousand times by now. Fearing more angry tirades involving heavier equipment being used as missile weapons, he moved towards the door, taking his briefcase full of expensive camera apparatus with him. He couldn’t blame the scientist for being so stressed. Not only was he overworked to a point that would break most people, who had normal, healthy sleep patterns in the first place, his work was becoming such a matter of international security, multiple Governments were constantly breathing down his neck even when the damn things actually worked properly. And now it was all going horribly wrong and he was about to get the blame. He didn’t even have time to lament this, however, as he was trying to stop a paranoid orbital weapons platform from turning on the planet it was meant to be protecting, while simultaneously dealing with the fact that the latest thing it thought was an alien conspiracy, was an attack on one of his very few close friends, one that it was extremely unlikely the friend could survive. 

“I saw two people teleport from the top floor,” the camera guy reminded Dr. Andonuts, “One of them could easily have been Brick Road.”

“He’s not even vaguely psychic!” snapped the scientist. It wasn’t quite true – the man had been tested for talent and gave off a very faint reading, probably to do with his high level of machine empathy that aided his skill and experience at engineering – but the Camera Guy knew what he meant.

“No, but someone at the scene was a very powerful psychic...”

“Who probably used the damn Starstorm!” he slammed his hands on the desk in exasperation, “How am I supposed to calm down this satellite when there are so many crazy rogue psychics on the loose somewhere? Even the plants went out of control again...”

“I told you not to use buttercups.”

“I’m being serious!”

“So am I, yellow flowers are evil little sods. You haven’t seen what they do when they think nobody’s watching.”

“How am I going to stop Eagleland deciding to agree with the damn satellite, Leder?”

“I’ll keep doing what I can. I’ll bring Mr. Brick Road back. I swear.”

“Don’t promise anything you can’t deliver,” said Dr. Andonuts, “That’s where I went wrong.”

* * *

_  
The third attempt to pair a fourth-dimensional entity with a child was the successful one. The first had developed telepathy strong enough to persuade their caretakers to let them leave, then disappear. The security staff remembered nothing after the incident and the child couldn’t be tracked down again, apart from occasional cases of amnesia regarding very small windows of time. It was presumed that the child had simply talked people into things and then erased their memory until they reached safety where they weren’t recognised._

_The acceleration of the second child’s powers had been less subtle: they had been rather violent in temperament and their abilities augmented their physical capability. There had been warning signs when they became increasingly agitated and particularly expressed the wish to harm their fourth dimensional proxy. Five days later, they murdered everyone in their facility, set it on fire and also disappeared. After that, they were placed under heavier guard and their psychic powers constantly monitored._

_Strong psychic potential was always a necessary factor in the hosts. To even make contact with such a being at all required a lot of raw power, never mind even brushing the surface of their power without instantly burning out the mind. The founder of the Polestar school herself was the first to contact a fourth-dimensional being, leading to the immense release of psychic energy that ultimately destroyed Giygas. She reported coming into contact with a relatively ordinary human mind who just happened to be in a position where they could help. Several other people involved in the Giygas incident also experienced contact with this person – and have been able to agree on their name without checking with each other – including the famous ‘Dungeon Man’ Brick Road and a friend of Jeff Andonuts, the research director’s son – but none have ever been able to communicate properly or tap into the fourth-dimensional entity’s power. Recruits for large scale attempts were often taken from Dalaam, in particular those who had gone through the Mu training given to the royal family and survived with their minds intact, as they seemed particularly resilient to the strain of being disconnected from this world enough to contact the higher dimensions. The Garrickson family line was also known for its remarkably strong strain of hereditary psychic potential._

_Talking of Dr. Andonuts, he has agreed to use the stable connection in two projects: one of these is an interplanetary defence weapon, the other is an artificial dimension. This dimension is based upon several descriptions given to the facility of those constructed by psychics as alternative realities for themselves, often described as similar to a lucid dream except with greater sensory input, for some reason all referred to as ‘Magicant’. However, our experiments will be an attempt to create a much larger scale version of these ‘Magicants’ that can be experienced by more than one person, most probably using a circle of several ritually connected psychics all connected to a fourth-dimensional entity. This can be used to store something that it is vital does not decay, or even a dying person while a cure is found for their condition; for experiments that require a virtual environment for ethical reasons but a near-perfectly realistic result; even for long term storage of people, such as in an emergency planetary evacuation if a second interplanetary attack really does occur. In the far future, we might be living quite normally in such environments, which are easier to bend to our will! This project was accepted with much more enthusiasm and required less persuasion than the defence systems themselves, as Dr. Andonuts did not seem willing to create such a large scale weapon and especially not to entrust it to a Government, even the Dalaam Government whose leader he knows personally. It is true that the orbital laser, if it malfunctioned or was used with hostile intent, and if fired at the maximum possible power achievable by overcharging it, could punch a hole straight through the planet._

_Another interesting ethical dilemma raised by the research director, if impractical to actually research, is the possibility that the higher-dimensional entity does not wish to take part in the project. While they have volunteered help and given up information about themselves in the past, this was only for the immediate threat of fighting Giygas or when asked in polite conversation, and both connections were relatively short term. It is unknown if this world actually affects the higher-dimensional world or has any sentimental value for them, and even if it did, the entities might hold just as much reservation about creating such a dangerous weapon as some of us do. Our only hope is that we can explain to the higher being that there is a definite possibility of Giygas’ return. As Giygas exists in all dimensions, it is most probable that the Cosmic Destroyer is perceived as a threat even in higher dimensions where he can be damaged. The continued existence of a Phase Distorter in enemy hands, particularly an enemy who has vanished off the face of the map, means that we can’t be certain that our efforts cannot be undone. A mutual enemy is always a good way to persuade people to your cause. As far the artificial dimension project, it is likely that such a tool would be useful for them as well, assuming that they really are essentially human. If nothing else, working on the project together will help us learn how to communicate with each other in the hope that we might be able to do so more easily without the use of powerful psychics, and might even be able to visit each other’s worlds._

_There is also the possibility that the experiments so far have been draining or even hurting the entity, and that the connection may be against their will. It would certainly explain the two initial failed experiments and particularly why one of the children seemed to be fighting against their proxy. Of course, we would discontinue the experiments at once if such a theory turned out to be reality, or if it became too dangerous for the children. Right now, such a violent reaction is a very rare exception to the rule, and of course all families are compensated. These experiments are purely undertaken with the children’s informed consent and they are also paid well. We would never change our ethical standpoint on this. Unless maybe it was a matter of interplanetary security again, but the possibility of further attacks is not yet anything more than another theory.  
_

* * *

**The Void**

A loud thud wakes him up. The machine has turned back on and the sensors are warbling something about high radiation levels at him. They seem deafeningly loud, reverberating around a chamber that's too impossibly huge. He braces himself for an impact that his senses scream is going to kill his tiny body but some instinct kicks in and he drags himself away from it.

Flying. He's flying. As he vibrates his wings at a rate that he isn't sure should actually enable him to fly, he emits a low buzz. His wings pull him around in erratic circles. He has no idea how to control his completely unfamiliar body or override his panicked bee instincts. He realises he's lucky that he was left with his mind at all. Somewhere between him blacking out and waking up again during the transition from spatiotemporal travel and full physical reality, he subconsciously became a little more used to his body. Everything is still too large, happening too slowly, and he keeps having to force himself not to head off in a direction he somehow knows the nearest flower patch is.

Once he leaves the shielding of his ship, he realises, he'll be exposed to too much radiation for a bee.


	5. Chapter 5

**Blind Teleport Arrival Point**

Frisk re-emerged to find that they still existed. They were several feet off the ground when they fell out of the portal, somewhere that was still freezing cold and now covered in fog, and they had to brace themselves for a rough landing on what looked like rather jagged rock, but they hadn't failed to recombine into their component particles, been instantly crushed to death after having apparated halfway through the nearby cliff face, or ended up facing a drop that was several thousand feet higher, without enough energy left to use the fall's momentum as a vertical run-up to another teleport. Frisk had even heard tales from other children in the lab of incidents where people who hadn't received enough training had tried group teleportation and had ended up spliced together like some kind of freakish abominations with three heads and six arms. Not that they were stupid enough to believe all the dumb horror stories they all told each other in the middle of the night, but it was hard to know what was real any more. 

They hadn't believed the stories about some of the kids flipping out and killing people after the contact with the higher-dimensional entities either. After all, their own communications had always been quite pleasant; the entity really did seem like they were just a person, quite possibly another child. Sometimes they sounded a little sad, as though they were as lonely and homesick as the children in the lab. However, Frisk was also aware of how unusually easy and painless they found higher-dimensional linking compared to most of the other children. There was never any of the pain or fear that accompanied the act of brushing up against a mind that was, despite appearances, incomprehensibly far away, in a form of existence that inherently allowed more free rein to manipulate the fates of people in lower dimensions. Even the amount of psychic energy involved in the link had been too much for the minds of some of the children, although they were only riding the channel, not leading it, and the experiment had needed to be stopped to disconnect the children before their psyches were irreversibly damaged.

Then, quite suddenly, Chara had stabbed twenty people to death in the entity's name. What’s more, the two of them had just careened across a mountain path, bouncing several times along the way, and were now about to slide straight off the cliff edge. Frisk heard Chara yell out and felt the other child grab their arm. With their other hand, Frisk fumbled blindly around for an overhanging ledge, a handhold, anything at all they could grab onto. They closed their eyes as the ledge came into dizzying view, the bottom too far down to see. Instead of falling, they slammed into an invisible barrier - a psychic shield thrown up by Chara, no doubt. For a second, they hung in mid-air, frozen by fear. Then Chara yanked on their shirt collar and dragged them back onto the path again. The two of them flattened themselves on the other side of the path for a long time, gasping for breath. The thin air at such a high altitude was causing their breath to come out even shallower, until it felt as though they would die from asphyxiation after surviving so much. Frisk tried to remember the breathing exercises they had been taught, simple techniques that involved no psychic ability. You've been up mountains before, they reminded themselves, probably higher ones. Wherever this is, it isn't Dalaam, and all the highest mountains are in Dalaam. They talked over the exercise with Chara until they, too, recovered enough to speak. Chara immediately rummaged around in their trouser pocket until they retrieved a candy bar.

"How long have you had food?" Frisk gave their friend an accusing look.

"I was saving it for when we really needed it," explained Chara through chattering teeth as they divided the bar into rough halves. Frisk's hands shook but they managed to force it into their mouth and swallow the food. Even the small amount of nourishment brought back some energy, just enough to think straight and collect a small pool of psychic power again. They slowly arranged the power into a fresh shield against the elements, using the rest to heal the scrapes and bruises that the of them had taken during the rough landing. 

"We should make a fire," Chara looked around. Tree tops were visible in the distance, not too far away. They were tall conifers, their higher branches covered in snow. It was a very picturesque scene, the sort of thing that the two of them sometimes saw on festive greetings cards. 

"You think we can make it over there?" asked Chara, pointing to the closest line of trees, around half a mile down the narrow mountain path, with only a small climb, "I've got a bit more food. I couldn't take too much, I'm sorry, they'd have been suspicious if they thought I was hoarding."

"How long in advance have you been planning this?" demanded Frisk, "I thought your friend just randomly told you to do it, and you did it."

"We've been talking for a long time in private," admitted Chara, "Not just around the time we make the link. I’ve got a pretty strong connection most of the time."

“Did they tell you to come here, too?” 

Chara shook their head, “I have no idea where we are.”

“It’s not Winters?” Frack asked, “I thought you came from here.”

“Winters is a big place, you know, there’s lots of places I don’t even know exist,” said Chara, scratching the back of their head, “It’s not like I was there for very long before I was chosen for the programme, either.”

“You were at the big school, right?”

“Snow Wood Boarding School,” said Chara, “And no, I’ve never met Jeff Andonuts. He’s almost graduated, and he’s probably got big-shot stuff to do, these days. I was going to do well at school, too, before I volunteered for the program.”

“It’s okay, Chara, I know they put people under a lot of pressure,” said Frack, “It’s unheard-of not to accept, back home. Most of us don’t even know it’s not mandatory.”

“You know, I don’t think this is Winters at all,” said Cass, idly brushing snow off the rock face and chipping away at it with a small, sharp stone. The two of them had been walking for quite a while without realising it. Sometimes it was hard to tell how exhausted or in pain you were when you could psychically enhance yourself. It could even become dangerous, if you weren’t used to it, “My geography was pretty good in school. This really looks like Mount Ebott.”

“Where’s that?”

“You really don’t know? It’s right next to Mount Itoi.”

Frisk blinked, not expecting Chara to actually use their real name. They blushed when they remembered it was the sacred mountain range they were named after.

“That’s clear on the other side of Eagleland!” said Cass, “We can’t have teleported all that way in our state!”

“Not without a teleport accident. Or deliberate redirection,” a light gleamed in Chara’s eyes.

“The Government can do that n-” Frisk gulped and didn’t finish the sentence, “It’s your friend, isn’t it?”

“We’ve been led here all along,” said Chara, smiling, “Probably a good thing. We couldn’t have made it on our own.”

“Why are they helping us, anyway? All you ever do is threaten to stab them!”

“You really don’t understand, do you?” Chara laughed softly, “They asked me to kill them. It was the one condition for helping us at all.”

Ignoring Frisk’s confused look, the child began lighting the firewood. Their friend quickly moved to assist with stabilising and directing the pyrokinesis before Chara became overexcited again and burned down another tree.

* * *

Leder the Camera Guy counted two flashing lights. Two teleports, extremely long-range, blind, with multiple targets, and without any lethal accidents. That was something only he was supposed to be able to achieve, and then only because he was hyperspecialised. 

Following them from a safe distance – there were still routes that only he could take – he could feel the psychic energy build in the atmosphere to tangible levels as he climbed further up the strangely spiralling mountain path. He could smell and taste rust, and his camera equipment had gone haywire again. The last time he had felt anything like this, there was a spontaneous electrical storm. It occurred to him that there was absolutely nowhere to hide in the case of a natural disaster. His hands clenched with the effort to resist teleporting away again.

Slowly, one by one and totally unaware of each other, the parties made their way into the cave at the mountain peak. They were silent as they walked up the path, then carefully shimmied into the cave mouth, passing between the stalactites that grew almost as high as them. Following and wondering where four people had disappeared to in a small cave, Leder could hear dripping water and see faint luminescence from somewhere in the back of the cave, as well as a low hum. He looked around him once more to make sure he hadn’t become the one followed, then he approached the strange glow. It was an odd colour, and seemingly embedded into crystalline veins in the cave wall.

He realised that he was quite fortunate that the ecology of this place was all wrong. There should have been monsters somewhere this remote. Very strong monsters, with this amount of natural psychic energy. Lack of monsters could have meant that they were deliberately avoiding a place that was considered highly dangerous even by their standards. Everything about the place felt odd, in a way that made it impossible to find out whether it was a bad thing or not. There just seemed… too much of it. As if it was saturated into the very rocks, as if everything was more alive.

Still hearing no further sounds of other inhabitants, Leder traced the outline of the rock with his fingers, wet, slick, slightly jagged. The luminous pattern was broken as his fingers passed over it. Then he turned a corner into a chamber that he could only barely fit inside, with jagged edges, along which ran a network of magenta lines. The lines converged in the middle with a dais that could have been natural, artificial, maybe grown from rock by some deliberate process, it was difficult to tell. And on the dais was a single, perfectly carved magenta stone in the shape of a giant spiral seashell. On the side facing the entrance was carved two 'X' symbols. Leder reached out to touch them and heard a clear, melodic chime that seemed to reach directly into his mind. There was a sentience to it, one with a very powerful psychic signature. Startled, Leder pulled their hand back and hissed as though burned.

The flood of images that cascaded through his mind told him exactly what this was, and where the other two parties had gone. 

Steeling himself, he pressed the palm of his hand firmly against the rock and accepted its invitation.

* * *

**Onett**

As he plans his next move, trying to land heavily enough on the keyboard to press a key or stop buzzing long enough to activate voice commands, he starts to hear familiar voices. One fills him with dread, makes him want to freeze up and stay very quiet in the corner of the vessel until the voice is gone. The other voice makes him change his mind. He knows this is the one he needs to talk to, that this is the correct time and place, probably the only chance he'll get.

Pokey looks more like he used to, more like a human child with only a slightly evil glint in his eye. He doesn't seem to react to the talking bee except with absolute terror at the situation in general. It looks like normal fear of the unknown from someone who isn't particularly brave. If the boy knows what's going to happen, he's gotten good enough at lying to hide it.

The bee talks with Ness and Picky about Giygas as they walk. Flying even a small distance is exhausting when trying to keep up with the pace of a human. He wants to warn the boys about Pokey and about not letting anyone work on the same weapons they use to fight Giygas once the threat is over, but he knows there isn't time. He isn't sure why he has such a strong impression of the future but he knows without doubt that he won't live for very long, even taking into account that he's in the body of an experimental chimeric bee/human, his Phase Distorter has crashed, he's taken in a lot of radiation and Giygas will find him eventually. 

He wonders if he's done this before, if he's already travelled back and it hasn't worked because he doesn't have enough time. Maybe this is his role, now, to continuously appear in this time until he's made enough of a difference. The thought fills him with panic but if this is the case, there's nothing much he can do about it except learn as much as possible and try to warn someone.

He must have done something right already, because he doesn't remember having the stone thing with him before.

**Author's Note:**

> I apologise for how patchwork this is, it was originally a plan for a longer project and is now a storage place for the ideas. I don't know who I intended Dungeon Man's assistant to end up being - possibly Sans?


End file.
